The set goes, we finish up and and I'm walking around afterwards wondering what happened to my gear.

"Widow Maker? Baby?"

Finally, our "roadie" said he found our hand truck and would pull my amp out. But, wait. We didn't have a hand truck. Hmm... This is the way it works, folks, anytime you think "Hmm," something is probably wrong. But hey, I was a young dumb kid so loaded on free beer I could barely work my fingers, much less put together a sentence asking where that thing came from.

"Cool," I thought as I jumped in the van. The roadie pulled the Widow Maker and "our" hand truck in and we took off for home.

Sometime during the trip it occurred to me that the hand truck was not ours. It was the club's. We stole it from them. You could put together your thoughts as if this was justified, but in the back of my mind, we stole from them. Burning bridges in this business is not a good thing.

About two or three hours from home, I decided we had to go back and I took over the driving. This was not right. Fuck, everyone was sleeping anyhow. Who cares? We had to take the hand truck back. You don't want to leave a club thinking that a band stole from them. I don't even know how much those fucking hand trucks are, but I spent more on gas bringing it back than the fucking OPEC nations do pumping out crude.

When I got back, the guy who had stamped our hands the night before was still at the door, probably too tweaked to go home. He asked what we wanted. It was way before six in the morning and they weren't even open yet. I explained to him how we made a big mistake the night before and grabbed their hand truck by accident and we wanted to return it and it was an honest mistake and...

The dude looks at the hand truck. Stares. Then says, "You didn't have to bring that back. That's an old one."

At that exact moment when those words hit my ears, I decided I would burn every bridge like the Towering fucking Inferno.